Strange Trip: 5 Songs That Transport You

Teri Gender Bender (of Le Butcherettes) has joined the ranks of Bosnian Rainbows, a group featuring members of The Mars Volta.

Courtesy of the artist

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Originally published on June 17, 2013 11:04 am

The first time I ever heard Chancha Via Circuito's Rio Arriba, I sent the Argentine DJ a letter, explaining why I was obsessed with his new record. With its huffing-and-puffing mechanical beats underneath wailing, sorrowful Argentine folk, the songs sounded like the long train rides that used to transport me around my native Buenos Aires. Indeed, Chancha Via Circuito (born Pedro Canale) got his unusual moniker from his own endless commutes into that same city, on a train called "La Chancha" ("The Pig") because it looks like a big, rusty metal swine trudging into the city. The sheer exhaustion expressed in his music expertly captures the sounds of not just La Chancha, but also voyaging and displacement in general.

It's no coincidence that so many of the songs we play on Alt.Latino revolve around themes of voyaging: It's impossible to talk about Latino culture without discussing Diaspora. While politicians and strategists often interpret Hispanics as one unified bloc of voters and consumers — resulting, naturally, in perplexing and often condescending marketing formulas — some common threads bind our stories together, including the immediate or inherited memory of Diaspora. And, of course, a shared musical lexicon.

This week, we have the infectious "Torn Maps" from Bosnian Rainbows, a new project featuring Teri Gender Bender (of Le Butcherettes) and Omar Rodriguez Lopez. We also have the pleasure of hearing something new from Chancha: "Deropolitissa," from his Semilla EP, beautifully combines cumbia with a traditional Greek song lamenting the Ottoman occupation in the 15th to 19th centuries, and the ensuing persecution of Greek Christians. I dare anyone to find another Latin version of that song. Yet its core theme is fairly universal — the struggle to maintain identity in the face of often brutal change is one of the most common issues in Latin music.

In the note I wrote to Chancha Via Circuito, I mentioned to him that when I first arrived in the U.S. following Argentina's economic collapse, I did a lot of sleeping on trains. At night in bed, I had constant nightmares about the chaos I'd left behind. But in my commute to work, I discovered that trains were a place where I could sleep with ease. I would press my ear against the window so that my body could feel the mechanical lullaby of the wheels on the train tracks. Every single time, like a charm, I'd fall into a semi-conscious state and dream that I was on a train in my native city, heading home, where all was back to normal. The rhythm of the train was so soothing, I began riding it aimlessly on weekends, just so I could dream to the beat of its machinery. When I first heard Chancha's music, I immediately recognized that super-secret lullaby I used to hear on the Baltimore train tracks.

While Alt.Latino is designed to introduce people to cool new music they might never have considered, my hope is that in some capacity, we're also a transmitter antenna of those secret lullaby signals — the familiar ones that remind some of us where we came from and what we've been through, and what it means to finally sleep at ease.